In a bid to unify its bureaus’ editorial workflow, Reuters in November tapped MediaSpan Media Software to develop a publishing platform to accelerate how its journalists file news, graphics and multimedia elements.

The final platform, to be based on MediaSpan’s Jazbox editorial software, will enable Reuters’ journalists worldwide to assemble and deliver multimedia news packages with text, pictures, graphics and video in seven languages to the agency’s news media and financial market customers, as well as to Web sites such as www.reuters.com.

 

“It’s an exciting time in the news market at the moment - the relationship between print and online publishers, news agencies such as Reuters and our readers is rapidly evolving and companies must be ready to respond quickly to these changes,” Thomas Defoe, Reuters’ head of product management for news production told Newspapers & Technology. “(We are) confident that this project will help position us to adapt to the changing market.”

Phased delivery

The software will be rolled out in phases, Defoe said, with the first deployment expected this June. Installation will conclude in 2008.

Defoe said the first bureaus to use the apps would be Reuters’ 30 multimedia “packaging” locations, including major offices in New York, London, Singapore, Tokyo, Beijing, Taipei, Taiwan, and Sydney, Australia. Reuters has nearly 200 editorial bureaus worldwide, in approximately 130 countries.

The apps will be stored on servers in London and Singapore, with backup servers in those two cities providing continuity in the event of disruptions.

Defoe said the software will benefit Reuters’ journalists as well as the newspapers receiving the feeds.

“Journalists will gain access to a modern production environment that allows them to work with their colleagues around the world and produce multimedia content more efficiently while customers such as newspapers, Web sites and users of Reuters financial market terminals will gain access to rich news feeds that provide them with multimedia-based, comprehensive coverage of key stories,” he said.

Multimedia distribution

Key to Reuters choosing MediaSpan was the fact that the vendor’s software meshes with various media - making distribution of multimedia news packages a reality.

“Reuters serves many different types of customers, ranging from users of our dedicated financial market terminals to newspapers to Web sites,” Defoe said. “Each of these customers expects to receive content in different technical and stylistic formats. The fact that MediaSpan allows us to produce the basic content just once and then syndicate in many different formats to these different customers is one of the key cost efficiency drivers that will be delivered by this project.”

Central functions of the project include automatic packaging of all multimedia content produced by Reuters “to provide customers with a 360-degree view of a news event,” Defoe said, as well as journalist-driven selection of the most important stories on a particular topic.

“In the future we will be looking to take advantage of many of the other features provided by MediaSpan’s solution,” Defoe said.

Reuters chose MediaSpan after looking at a dozen vendors that offer editorial production apps and judging them based on various factors - most importantly, though, by how closely aligned their product strategies were with its own future vision, technical fit and commercial acceptability, Defoe said.

“Ultimately, we decided that MediaSpan came closest to matching our vision for a multimedia news production platform,” he added.

Ottaway wraps up Jazbox rollout

Meantime, Ottaway Newspapers capped off its two-year project to install Jazbox at its 13 daily and Sunday publications, with the last site going live in September.

“We finished about three weeks ahead of schedule,” said Ken Hall, vice president for news at Ottaway.

The publisher traded in its aging Dewarview app, which was integrated with QuarkXPress, in favor of Jazbox, which integrates with Adobe InDesign and InCopy.

“We’ve really reinvented the way we went from newsroom to print to Internet at the same time,” Hall said.

The publisher opted for a distributed environment because each paper is individual and because it wanted to prevent serious problems in the event that its wide-area network should go down.

“Locally controlled content was very important to us, so it made much more sense to have that control at each site,” Hall said.

Training the trainer

Training was key for Ottaway and Project Manager Carol Roosa said the publisher is a big proponent of the “train the trainer” concept.

“We did not have the vendor do all of our training,” she said. “Instead, we identified super users at each site and our focus was to train them to a point where they could be self-sufficient.”

It took three weeks for each site to deploy the software, beginning with features and editorial and ending with sports.

 “We had full (vendor) support for the first section and then by the news and sports rollouts the sites were training their own folks and it worked out very well,” Roosa said.

Each of the papers that installed the app is unique, Hall said, citing the Cape Cod Times in Hyannis, Mass., as a good example.

“The Cape Cod Times is very design-heavy and they like to have their design work locked in early in the day, or even early on in conceptualizing a story, so we had to be able to install for those specific requests,” Hall said. “It wasn’t just install the software, train them and move on - you have to train each site for how they want to use it.”

Shortly after Ottaway finished installing Jazbox at the papers’ sites, parent Dow Jones & Co. sold six of the papers to Community Newspaper Holdings Inc., which will continue to use the app.

The six papers are the News-Times in Danbury, Conn.; the Daily Star of Oneonta, N.Y., the Press-Republican of Plattsburgh, N.Y.; the Santa Cruz (Calif.) Sentinel; the Daily Item of Sunbury, Pa.; and the Traverse City (Mich.) Record-Eagle.

Finally, Sun Media Corp. of Canada also recently selected MediaSpan to install Jazbox throughout its chain of tabloid and community papers.